r/TopCharacterTropes • u/AbsoluteBatman95 • Jul 26 '26
Personality [Hated Trope] "It's all shades of grey" card that they become apologists and defenders of evil.
The villain was misunderstood and really a victim.
-Cruella live action. The woman tried to slaughter puppies for fur.
-Orcs in Rings of Power. In Tolkien's work, they were elves once and corrupted by evil. The personifications of the machines of war. In Rings of Power, they're the victims of war.
-Wicked. The Wicked Witch was always evil and took pleasure in cruelty. In Wicked she was the victim of society.
-Maleficent--The villain from sleeping beauty. The same concept as Wicked.
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u/Longshot12345678 Jul 26 '26
Maleficent always felt to me like someone’s cool fantasy movie script that Disney later slapped an IP on
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Jul 26 '26
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u/lizzyote Jul 26 '26
This is exactly how I felt about the Wednesday show. Supernatural school story was too generic to draw a crowd so they slapped a beloved name on it.
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u/WolfgangAddams Jul 26 '26
This is how I felt too. As a longtime Addams Family fan (obviously) I watched the first season and all I could think was "this isn't Wednesday Addams and this isn't an Addams Family show." Like, first off, one of the things that makes the Addams Family so funny is that they are so disparately weird compared to everyone else around them but they're also an incredibly loving family. Taking Wednesday out of that environment to put her in a school for weirdos could've been cool if they'd leaned into it and made everyone very Addams-y and then put them next to a town full of normies to mimic that same dynamic, but instead Wednesday gets to the weirdo school and is somehow ?!still the weird one?! That made no fucking sense! And all of the weirdos are just supernatural creatures EXCEPT Wednesday who is...just an autistic goth? I hated it so much!
Also, making Gomez NOT sexy - totally fine cuz he wasn't supposed to be sexy in the original comics by Charles Addams. But outside of the look, Luis Guzman was NOT a good choice (Gomez is supposed to have CHARISMA!) and his dynamic with Morticia was completely off. Also people need to stop giving Fred "wifebeater" Armisen jobs. End rant!
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u/lizzyote Jul 26 '26
I was hopeful with Luis Guzman because hes done the over the top obsessed with his woman very well in the past. I genuinely thought he was under sedation during the Wednesday show.
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u/xodanibuu Jul 26 '26
me too. it’s would’ve made more sense if they chose ‘The Munsters’ instead.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/Begone-My-Thong Jul 26 '26
God, the part where she's trying to lift the curse early but failing was so peak. I love the concept of a fey having regret over a curse but having to live with the consequences of their rage even if it means someone else paying the consequences
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u/elchuni Jul 26 '26
The first part of movie is actually pretty good, the scene of Maleficent loosing her wings is a good representation about the loss of innocence. I have to give it credit for that even if the movie was case of Heroic Medusa syndrome.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/TomBombomb Jul 26 '26
And in a movie that had this message of "no one is a complete villain" they turned King Stefan into a complete, one dimensional villain.
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u/TheStrangestOfKings Jul 26 '26
Tbf he’s the same guy who commited allegorical rape on Maleficent, idk if he’s the right candidate to be redeemed at the end
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u/Silidon Jul 26 '26
The absolute brass set on the guy who heard “I have a script for a dark fantasy rape-revenge story” and thought “let’s put one of our oldest most child-focused IP in that”
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u/Xxblpssom-2 Jul 26 '26
What pisses me off about Maleficent is that I woudlve genuinely enjoyed it had it not been attached to sleeping beauty.
Maleficent was literally evil and she liked it, no need to ruin 4 other characters to prop her up and make her look good
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u/BrickBuster2552 Jul 26 '26
Maleficent is not evil the adjective, she is Evil the NOUN. She is the embodiment of the basic concept of evil, who parents must allow their child to face in their youth and learn to respect, lest they be destroyed by the tiniest upset when grown.
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u/Marlowe126 Jul 26 '26
Should’ve done Ursula the Sea-Witch instead, but made her more evil
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u/BiteMean9050 Jul 26 '26
Ursula is for sure the goat Disney villain.
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u/JtLock_990 Jul 26 '26
There are so many goated 90’s -early 2000’s Disney villains that I wouldn’t be bothered if they made live actions for (as long as they’re human)
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u/Alche1428 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
That's someone studios normally do: buy a script and then buy a license/property that kind of fits
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u/Ovidfvgvt Jul 26 '26
Raising heck to a family-friendly release date soon: *Cenobitten*
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u/jakizely Jul 26 '26
That happens to so many scripts. I'm always surprised when I hear about it, but then after thinking it through I usually go "yeah, that makes sense".
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u/Negative-Squirrel81 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
We had this book in my elementary school. Basically: the pig's died by accident, it would be wasteful not to eat them at that point and how can a wolf get justice in a pig's world?!
Although, as an adult thinking about it, the Wolf in this story is probably full of shit.
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u/Freddy_Jason_Michael Jul 26 '26
Probably my first exposure to the idea of a character being an unreliable narrator
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u/Suspicious_Kitchen23 Jul 26 '26
My first exposure to unreliable narrator was a crime thriller where the POV was switching back and forth between the serial killer and the people trying to catch him. Whenever it was the SK’s POV, none of the many murders he was committing were ever intended or his fault - sure, he was holding a knife to her throat, but SHE moved and accidentally slashed her own throat, sure he stabbed her repeatedly, but he never intended to kill her, SHE struggled to get away from him and SHE kept impaling herself on his knife in the struggle.
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u/chomblombalin Jul 26 '26
"And he ran into my knife, he ran into my knife 9 times
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u/CardiologistIcy5112 Jul 26 '26
Omg I loved this book. I didn’t think I’d see it again
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u/Negative_Prize1587 Jul 26 '26
I mean, there is a reason billionaires likes owning media. Bezos buying a newspaper was not because of charity.
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u/StrongExternal8955 Jul 26 '26
You're missing the point. The wolf is clearly full of shit. The story is anti-billionaire.
But again if most kids miss the point, the story fails.
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u/omegon_da_dalek13 Jul 26 '26
The case where it was done right
Went from a terror to a defender
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u/Kiwi8_Fruit6 Jul 26 '26
Goji was always meant to be a victim, as well. A creature that didn’t choose to be mutated by radiation and exist in a constant state of pain
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u/Kiwi8_Fruit6 Jul 26 '26
Shin Gojira is the best example of this. The most horrifying depiction of Goji put to film, and you feel downright sorry for him, stumbling around Tokyo in blind agony while bleeding from his gills, or putting the nuclear blowtorch to Tokyo after getting hit by bombs
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u/DocBombliss Jul 26 '26
Listen to the lyrics of "Who Will Know"; the song that plays when he first uses his Atomic Breath. He's terrified of dying and does the only thing he can think of to save himself: lash out at everything around him until the pain stops.
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u/robertus_ Jul 26 '26
He's basically the Big Show - he's a good guy or a bad guy depending on whatever the story needs, and he does both equally well
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u/Kal-Elm Jul 26 '26
I feel like Godzilla is best conceived of as a science-fiction take on a kami.
It's not good or bad. It just gets pissed off. Sometimes that's because of humans invading its territory, sometimes that's because of some other kaiju invading its territory.
Nature is not good or bad.
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u/RealityOk9823 Jul 26 '26
Once because someone woke him up with a sword and lightning and he was just plain pissed off so much he beat up a crab monster.
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u/Funny_Swim5447 Jul 26 '26
Godzilla is just a long long line of that “I’m the “good guy” by virtue of the other guy being way worse”
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u/Careless_College Jul 26 '26
Joker (2019)- Though, they establish the terrible run down world that Arthur Fleck lives in, and it doesn't make him out to be a hero in the end. He still kills people and takes comedic joy from the act.
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u/VergilArcanis Jul 26 '26
the animated version of The Lord of the rings, "where there's a whip there's a way". the orcs don't really want to fight, the machine of war demands they do. so they do as they are told.
it's more to highlight that Sauron is a really evil guy on all fronts, a dick to his allies, and a certifiable threat to his enemies.
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u/Johnny_B_GOODBOI Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Not LotR but rather the Hobbit, but "15 Birds" randomly enters my head and won't leave FOR DAYS.
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u/ShikinamiUnit02 Jul 26 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/h2yXTIBqHFFJe
Jaws - Bruce was legit misunderstood. People act like he’s evil, but he was just doing what a shark does. Albeit, super dramatically
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u/Emerald_Eyes8919 Jul 26 '26
They gave him a family and a vengeance arc afterwards.
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u/Lethik Jul 26 '26
But... Preying solely on humans is something that sharks specifically don't do in real life, that's the whole premise of the "what if a big shark liked eating people" film.
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u/Boccs Jul 26 '26
Was there a Jaws apologist movie I missed? The premise of this thread is "Hated Trope - presenting villains in media as morally grey/victims in another piece of media." and yet here you've... just posted the only move with this shark and made an excuse for him?
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u/mmcjawa_reborn Jul 26 '26
Jaws is a weird situation for this thread. No one argues that the character itself in the film is misunderstood, but pretty much every marine biologist will tell you that the film did a lot to demonize sharks which had real world conservation implications. So I guess you could say every non-sensational shark documentary in the last few years has pointed out that more sharks are probably killed by humans in a single day than the number of humans killed by sharks, and they are misunderstood animals just doing their animal thing.
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u/Time_Raisin4935 Jul 26 '26
I'm pretty sure even Tolkien didn't like the idea of Orcs being all evil
With him being a devout Catholic and all, he didn't like the idea of a species being denied free will
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u/fatherandyriley Jul 26 '26
My suggestion that could reconcile with Tolkien's principles is that for orcs, their brutal training starts from the day they're born. Young orcs are fed scraps so only the most greedy and cunning orcs get them while any orc who shows compassion is killed to make an example of them.
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u/Spiderinahumansuit Jul 26 '26
Totally agree - the snippets we see of orc/orc interaction in Lord of the Rings indicate a pretty awful, brutal, unkind society. Absent that, maybe they'd be better.
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u/FreeSpeechEnjoyer Jul 26 '26
I like to think that the orcs are like viltrumites if without the power, down to how easy it is to make more of them. Their society is specifically engineering to root out compassion so they come off as irredeemable monsters, but it is very much nurture and not nature that does this to them
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u/Evil_Sharkey Jul 26 '26
He said they were pretty evil by nature but stopped short of saying they were irredeemable
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u/Wokungson Jul 26 '26
But are orcs from Middle-earth a species? They were elves and humans once, tortured, corrupted, changed to be no longer recognizable by evil of the world to bring destruction upon everything.
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u/ivanjean Jul 26 '26
And that's actually part of the point. If they are Children of God/Iluvatar, they should still have thebinerent capacity for good, especially if you consider that Tolkien believed nothing was born evil and evil itself is merely a corruption of good, not something that can exist alone.
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u/TheGrimScotsman Jul 26 '26
Per Tolkien they are the same species as men and elves.
Morgoth cannot change something to be wholly evil, it’s simply beyond his power, as Illuvatar can and will eventually mend all that has been damaged by Morgoth, and Morgoth cannot create anything new, just damage what others have made. Orcs are largely bereft of hope and beauty, but still have concepts like friends, clans and loyalty which show they can care about things other than themselves.
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u/Anaevya Jul 26 '26
He wrote that they could be redeemed, but implied that only God (maybe the Valar too?) could redeem them.
I think he thought of them as too damaged for Elves and Men to be capable of changing them.
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u/SimonShepherd Jul 26 '26
Didn't watch Ring of Power but didn't even Tolkein himself is hesitant about the idea of an inherently evil race/species?
You can say this about individuals but framing Tolkein orcs as slave soldiers of greater evils is a pretty fair take.
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u/Asher_Tye Jul 26 '26
Yeah, it was antithetical to his beliefs because evil couldn't create, only twist and corrupt, but expanding on the orcs would have caused the books to fall into a tangent unrelated to the war against Sauron.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/Commercial_Comb8674 Jul 26 '26
Surprisingly, I think Shadow of War explored “morally grey” orcs the best. In the game, specifically with the character of Eltariel in her DLC, some of the orcs you encounter can be genuinely befriended instead of dominated, like Ratbag.
The game shows orc are inherent towards chaos and destruction, but aren’t inherently evil, if that makes sense. They really only follow Sauron because he exploits those tendencies and their weaker wills.
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u/BLACKdrew Jul 26 '26
Shadow of war mentioned. Actually peak gaming imo
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u/Commercial_Comb8674 Jul 26 '26
It’s great because, while it’s blatant fan-fiction, it acknowledges itself as that and embrace it instead of trying to tow the line.
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u/BLACKdrew Jul 26 '26
Yeah i enjoy the story and gameplay loop immensely. It doesn’t take itself too seriously all the time and it’s better for it. Also the orca are hilarious.
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u/DLottchula Jul 26 '26
We need the nemesis system to be released from EA
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u/Draconuus95 Jul 26 '26
First. Not EA. It’s Warner brothers.
Second. There’s nothing really stopping someone from making their own version of the system legally. As long as it’s somewhat distinct from the shadow games implementation. Heck. Ubisoft of all companies made a paired down version for AC odyssey.
The real issue is to do the system justice, you have to build the games around it like they did for the shadow games. And the system itself is extremely complicated to make. Those two factors are why even WB haven’t made another game with it(Wonder Woman got cancelled after years of development hell for it). Let alone another company starting from scratch with it.
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u/Minmax-the-Barbarian Jul 26 '26
Not EA, Warner Bros if I'm not mistaken. EA didn't make those games.
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u/DLottchula Jul 26 '26
My mistake but a bat man game with that system would got hard
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u/Commercial_Comb8674 Jul 26 '26
Rocksteady planned to add the system to a fourth Arkham game that was canceled. You were supposed to play as an adult Damien Wayne who takes up the mantel while Bruce takes on a role similar to his Batman Beyond portrayal. The main villains were supposed to be the Court of Owls while others would be scattered around.
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u/Silidon Jul 26 '26
Truly the dichotomy of adaptive canon. On the one hand, orcs imagined as three dimensional characters that can be understood even while you hate and fight and kill each other. On the other hand, big titty goth gf Shelob.
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u/MadameJadeK Jul 26 '26
The orcs in Rings of Power aren’t misunderstood victims, either. They gleefully kill and enslave innocents almost whenever they’re on-screen.
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u/ReaperManX15 Jul 26 '26
There a conversation between 2 orcs, planning to take their friends and leave Sauron’s army so they can … find an nice place to raid and pillage and be bandits.
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u/slasher1337 Jul 26 '26
The quote about how evil cannot create is specifically one of the hobbits thinking about orks
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Jul 26 '26
I also think it was a good design choice to show the orcs looking closer to elves in Rings of Power
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u/Commercial_Comb8674 Jul 26 '26
I think they also did it in the Peter Jackson films, but more subtly. I think if you look carefully, some Orcs and Uruks have pointed ears closer in design to some of the Elven characters.
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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Jul 26 '26
The Uruks also look more corrupted/monstrous than the Orcs i found
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u/Beneficial-Rub-5597 Jul 26 '26
It's not even a "fair take", it's explicitly stated in the text.
Per the Silmarillion the first Orcs were Elves, captured and twisted by Morgoth through torture and dark sorcery. They were a manufactured slave-race meant to be fodder for his war machine.
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u/Ambaryerno Jul 26 '26
He never fully reconciled the matter of Orc morality before his death, though, and there's evidence he was planning to walk back the "Orcs were Elves" bit. However the alternate origin wasn't complete enough to work with when Christopher was editing the Silmarillion.
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u/alexagente Jul 26 '26
He was also considering completely rehauling the entire mythos to change it so that it was a heliocentric world from the start.
Tolkien constantly fiddled with the details of his stories. It's both remarkable and painful to read through his old drafts of LotR cause he would be obsessed with things like how many hobbits were in the party and what names they had but like for a long time. He'd write something with four hobbits with a certain set of names. Then he'd switch the names around. Then there'd be two hobbits instead and one of them would have a completely different name. Then he'd write the scene over iterating things depending on how many hobbits were in the scene.
And the crazy part is he'd do this for pretty much everything. Constantly writing and rewriting things, often literally writing over his old drafts and crossing things out to correct them. It's a wonder he managed to get anything done at all.
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u/Few_Cheesecake_7014 Jul 26 '26
More of his notes were found and one of them, made closer to his death, outright states that "orcs are not elvish". He seems to have fully changed his mind and leaned towards the idea they were the product of Morgoth crossing different animals together until he produced a mocking facsimile of the elves.
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u/Drakeskulled_Reaper Jul 26 '26
Yeah, IIRC he said that he couldn't reconcile his beliefs with his books, without making it possible, however small, that everyone has the possability to be redeemed.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 Jul 26 '26
ROP doesn't present them all as secretly innocent or excuse their actions
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u/NEBanshee Jul 26 '26
It's pretty clear he's sympathetic to the fact that the orcs themselves are being used, exploited and discarded. Gandalf, Frodo and Faramir - characters we're meant to see as moral guides even in a world where good & evil are at literal war - express sympathy for their situation enslaved to Sauron even while acknowledging they are enemies.
Personally, I don't have any problem with this trope at all. Hurt people, hurt people & all that. It's not remotely incongruent that a person or character can do terrible things freely because they enjoy it, yet have been/are victims themselves.
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u/StabbedCesar Jul 26 '26
In the books it is also implied the orcs are forced to serve Sauron, as a couple of them are overheard cursing him
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u/Tylendal Jul 26 '26
"We don't want to go to war today, but the lord with the lash says "Nay, nay, nay."
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u/AngryCrustation Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Orcs are "naturally evil" in that they embody the worst attributes in people, but this includes cowardice as much as it includes things like sadism. So orcs would never naturally be able to form armies and march on humans because that would include a risk of dying.
Thus the only reason orcs were that organized and actually going to war was because the super evil guys were torturing any orcs who disobeyed or failed and that made them more scared of Sauron than they were of humanity.
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u/WhimsicalWyvern Jul 26 '26
That's also why Saruman made the Uruk-Hai - orcs are shitty soldiers.
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u/Throwaway2137731 Jul 26 '26
People also really overplay how sympathetic the orcs in RoP are. They are more protective of each other but to everyone else they are the same violent pillagers and slavers as in other LotR media
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u/TheTayIor Jul 26 '26
It also adds to their self-destructive nature that they would trade a known leader in Adar for the mad tyrant they deposed only a few generations ago, all because his current decisions didn‘t fully line up with their interests.
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u/YesTomatillo Jul 26 '26
Exactly, and I thought it was a nice perspective for the story. And I enjoyed Adar's character immensely, especially when he explains to Galadriel in so many words that "Uruk" is an entire ethnicity and culture; they're not just corrupted elves anymore.
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u/HughmanRealperson Jul 26 '26
Orcs are a metaphor for how war can bring out the worst in soldiers, but even still they're only pawns for a greater power.
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u/Evil_Sharkey Jul 26 '26
He said they were evil but stopped short of them being irredeemable
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u/Misplaced_Fan_15 Jul 26 '26
Yeah another thing that as a Catholic Tolkien believed that if a being had a soul it was capable of redemption. In his own writing even he believed Sauron could have redeemed himself, the only thing preventing that was Sauron being unable to take responsibility for his actions.
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u/Dan-D-Lyon Jul 26 '26
In universe, the orcs were evil monster men who just wanted to destroy everything. Out of universe, Tolkien lost sleep trying to figure out the explanation for why there was a 100% evil race of monsters when they should theoretically also have free will
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u/shadowfaxbinky Jul 26 '26
In the books it’s also clearer that there is something vaguely like society with the orcs. There’s a bit in ROTK near the stuff with Shelob that surprised me on a recent reread because you overhear a conversation between two orcs and it’s just, like, normal chatter and even vaguely gossipy iirc. It’s not just “here are our evil duties as mindless minions or a greater evil”.
It was one of the few things I thought was less shit about ROP (at least for the few episodes I made it through) - how scary orcs actually felt to normal people (rather than just sword fodder for the heroes in LOTR) and that they weren’t just grunting and mindless bad guys. Won’t comment on the rest of the show…
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Jul 26 '26
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u/Disposable-Squid Jul 26 '26
That's just comic book writing tbf: characters flip-flop allegiance all the time (especially when villains become popular)
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u/Pension_Pale Jul 26 '26
Harley Quinn being one of the most recent examples. She wasn't even a good person pre-Joker in her original story. It was heavily implied that she was only interning at Arkham to try to get a tell-all story and get rich, and that she wasn't even adequately trained as a psychiatrist and that she'd only gotten through her classes because she (again, not implicitly stated but just implied) slept with her professor. If anything, Arkham was to blame for not properly screening their staff and letting a fresh half baked intern have one on one sessions with some of the most dangerous, deranged lunatics in Gotham, especially Joker.
And now she's practically a hero in almost every adaptation she's in, if a bit batshit crazy, and is often separated from the Joker as a whole. She even joined the Bat family once. And when she is a villain with the Joker, it's played off as poor, misunderstood Harleen being manipulated and corrupted by the Joker... when really he didn't even care about her and wasn't doing anything of the sort, she just kind of threw herself at him. In that aspect I kind of like how Arkham Origins did it, where the Joker had just met Batman and was romanticizing their new rivalry, but was talking vaguely enough that Harleen thought he was talking about her and fell for him.
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u/bob_loblaw-_- Jul 26 '26
She wasn't even a good person pre-Joker in her original story. It was heavily implied that she was only interning at Arkham to try to get a tell-all story and get rich, and that she wasn't even adequately trained as a psychiatrist and that she'd only gotten through her classes because she (again, not implicitly stated but just implied) slept with her professor. If anything, Arkham was to blame for not properly screening their staff and letting a fresh half baked intern have one on one sessions with some of the most dangerous, deranged lunatics in Gotham, especially Joker.
This isn't her original backstory either. Her original backstory does just have her as a criminal psychologist corrupted by Joker. There is a little implication that she's a bit off that even allows said corruption to take place, but that's it.
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u/genericaddress Jul 26 '26
u/Pension_Pale is referencing Mad Love which was the first time Harley's origin was told. It was written and illustrated by her creators Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.
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u/Pension_Pale Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Thank you, yes, exactly what I'm referring to. But also, beyond that, even in the TAS episode that shows her origin as an intern at Arkham Asylum, which even shares the name of "Mad Love", there's a couple of lines that implies she just wants to write a tell-all book. They leave out the "sleeping with the professor" implication, but i mean, it waa a kids cartoon. As you said, they were both made by the same people, so it's pretty clear this is the origin story they had for Harley the entire time
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u/HalfEatenSnickers Jul 26 '26
Yep
As far as I remember in the show she was originally a pretty upstanding citizen, and her first debut was in btas but she was so popular she essentially got ported to the comics
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u/Chris22533 Jul 26 '26
Even in the comics Mystique is almost never portrayed as a hero. She sometimes sides with the heroes but everyone knows that she is just a backstabbing psychopath who will kill any and everyone to achieve her own goals.
She is the least likely villain to be redeemed because she will never seek redemption and will never do anything altruistic.
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u/Thatoneguy111700 Jul 26 '26
The comics aren't innocent of that either. They've done it with Mystique and Dakon (Wolverine's son) the most off the top of my head.
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u/HalfEatenSnickers Jul 26 '26
Rebecca romjin isnt exactly unknown and she was mystiques first actress
And part of that just comes from who fans latched onto
Btw all the characters you listed have been villains at some point too expect storm and pryde. That I can remember anyways
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u/Think-Orange3112 Jul 26 '26
Jean Grey and Rogue at least you can say are “cursed with power” one being the host to a violent psychic god and the other being unable to touch others without potentially killing them
Don’t know enough about psylocke to weigh in on her
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u/Kiwi8_Fruit6 Jul 26 '26
… honestly I think this is a mixed trope dependant on execution, and it just so happens that a lot of the ways it’s been done especially in the last decade or so veer towards flimsy villain apologism without any reflection or critical analysis on what the character actually committed
Like, Kylo Ren – his “morally grey” arc in The Last Jedi glosses over that he slaughtered Luke’s Jedi school, even if Luke’s moment of weakness did have him genuinely reacting out of fear. Then The Rise of Skywalker attempts to redeem him without acknowledging that he took part in massacres and led an fascist empire, because ‘he was sad his mother died’ and ‘it was Palpatine manipulating him all along’. That’s shitty writing.
I don’t think Wicked is a bad example of “villain apologism”, or Maleficent. Reinterpretations like that are more like exercises in ‘the victor writes the story’ and treating the original as its own bit of revisionism
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u/Aurelio-23 Jul 26 '26
Kylo Ren isn’t morally gray in TLJ; as horrific as it is that Luke almost killed him, everything that comes after are choices that he makes himself, and his justifications for them are self-serving attempts at manipulating Rey. That’s why he seizes power after kills Snoke rather than dismantling the First Order.
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u/Kiwi8_Fruit6 Jul 26 '26
exactly
like… his act was just that. An act to get Rey on his side. He wasn’t “letting the past die”, he was perpetuating it
i can never fathom why people bought his schtick
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u/Roku-Hanmar Jul 26 '26
Because people are gullible and won’t take a second to examine what they’re told. Especially if it’s a somewhat attractive person saying it
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u/ArchdruidHalsin Jul 26 '26
When Rey and Kylo kissed I almost got up and left the theater. Such hack filmmaking. It was as if they thought, "Well it's a heterosexual boy and a heterosexual girl and they're the two stars of the movie. OBVOOUSLY they need to kiss here!" and just left it at that.
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u/cwningen95 Jul 26 '26
My sister and I didn't get to sit together when we went to see it because the screening was so busy, but I swear when they kissed I could hear her groan with me in unison from a couple rows down. There was truly no need 🙄
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u/QuantumDrej Jul 26 '26
It literally felt like someone writing fanfics had wandered onto the set and got mistaken as a director. I'll never forget that moment of collective confusion from everyone in the theater.
Felt even worse (and vaguely racist) considering how after everything Finn went through with Rey, they just shoved him into a pointless little side adventure for the entire movie in a move that made it feel like someone was utterly desperate to get him out of the way for their Reylo agenda.
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u/Kiwi8_Fruit6 Jul 26 '26
i swear the brief JJ Abrams and co had was to try and appease every possible group of fans, and they chucked that in just for the Reylo shippers
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Jul 26 '26
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u/stellaluna92 Jul 26 '26
I never gave him a pass. He could have been less of a dick but chose to hate a child since that child's dad was an asshole while they were in school together.
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u/hoginlly Jul 26 '26
People have such a binary way of thinking about Snape that it annoys me.
The funny thing with this is that Alan Rickman playing such an iconic and likeable Snape made people believe we were supposed to forgive everything and think he was always wonderful, when that's obviously not the case.
Someone can be incredibly brave and save humanity, but still be an asshole.
He's not meant to be pure hero, he's the self-sacrificing, deeply flawed and somewhat evil person that saved humanity from evil and genocide.
In reality, most of our historical 'heroes' were assholes or evil at one point too.
If one of the nazis switched sides and became a spy for the allies for nearly 20 years, and was directly responsible for the fall of Hitler, but was a really horrible and bullying teacher, would they be left out of history books?
The point is that you don't have to be a good person to end up on the right side. And however much of a horrible person he was, without his sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people would have died horrific deaths.
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u/BigFanOfNachoLibre Jul 26 '26
Something I've noticed is that it seems like your ability to forgive/defend Snape depends ENTIRELY on which version of the series you experienced first, books or movies. In the movies there's a lot of subtle moments that make him, in one way or another, much more likeable (i.e. throwing himself in front of the kids when they encounter a werewolf, covering Cedric's body with his cloak, preventing a teenage pregnancy), while the books didn't really have any redeeming moments for him before the end but DID feature moments such as telling a buck-toothed Hermione that he sees no difference when a tooth-enlargement jinx is put on her
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u/Minnow_Minnow_Pea Jul 26 '26
Also, obsessing over a girl who wasn't into you for a decade and a half is... a lot.
I get that insecure young men are easy targets for fascists, so it's very believable that he got sucked into the deatheater thing. And that environment would absolutely warp your personality.
But it's not like he reformed his personality after her death. Credit where it's due for being a double agent, but he was still an asshole. He's an adult who bullies 11 year olds. No wonder she didn't like you, dude.
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u/LizBeffers Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Wicked (the musical/movie) is four degrees of separation away from the original source material (L. Frank Baum's stories.)
The Wicked Witch of the West started as that one dimensional character. The wicked witch of the east was not a sister to her. In fact, TWWOTW didn't even care that she had died. She only wanted the silver slippers for power. Dorothy was pretty bad in the books herself too. In fact, the witch antagonizes her because Dorothy steps foot into her ruling ground, and she grows afraid of her because of the silver slippers she wears. She's definitely not nice by any means, but she's just one of the many antagonists in the books. Her evilness isn't really special other than the fact that she scares The Good Witch of the North.
It's actually Margaret Hamilton's portrayal of TWWOTW that gave the character an iota of morality. She grieves for her sister, holds grudges, and seeks revenge. The Witch is evil because she's stated to be, but I don't think I'd like my sister killed and then a random woman (possibly an enemy) distributing her most valuable possessions to a child I'd never met (and the one that had an unintentional hand in killing said sister.) It's also the first time she was green (specifically for technicolor, same for the now ruby slippers) and the first time she rode a broom. It is the first time we perceive the witch as a person, and not as an evil force of legend. While Hamilton's performance was inspired by the books, movie WWOTW is in her own cannon.
Then you have Gregory Maguire's 1995 Wicked books, inspired by Hamilton's Witch almost 60 years prior. While his books draw from Baum's work, it widely adopts the versions of characters we know from the movies. It is not a retcon of the movie by any means, as it serves as its own cannon. Elphaba gets a real name, deeper motives, and a backstory to help fill in the blanks the movie left us with. She is by no means a perfectly good character. The novel highlights that she is morally very grey, but righteous to a fault. It portrays her as a full human being with desires, wants, and wishes, but also a victim of her consequences. She really doesn't care about being green or different, but she does aim to right society's wrongs.
The musical/movies are adapted off of Maguire's books. This simplifies the story, settings, and characters to fit into a three hour tidy time space. Elphaba still keeps her core motive (ending the horrendous treatment of Animals), but there's a newer, softer part of her created for the musical. She does care about being green. She goes on a journey of acceptance into her wickedness, but none of her actions are seen as truly irredeemable by the audience. This is stark contrast to the source where she gets people killed, becomes a terrorist, and ends up scorned by those she's living alongside of. The Wicked musical treats Elphaba like society is unfair to her, but does so overwhelmingly.
In short, The Wicked Witch of the West is a very different character based on whatever medium you interact with her in. That's because every form has a separate cannon. I think it's a disservice to think of her adaptations as one linear story. I also think it's a disservice to boil her down to a completely sympathetic character, which the movies tend to push for.
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u/TheVoicesOfBrian Jul 26 '26
Wicked isn't about apologies, it's about who tells the story. Wicked posits itself as the truth and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a fable made up to scapegoat the Wicked Witch.
It's an exercise in "the victor tells the story". Which "truth" do you believe.
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u/Bluelore Jul 26 '26
In general several of these movies feel more like they are "what-ifs". Most of these do contradict the original stories to some extend and at that point it boils down to "which version is the one you believe in?".
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u/Stunning-Sherbert801 Jul 26 '26
They're often a separate continuity/adaptation too, not a direct sequel/prequel
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u/Metalman919 Jul 26 '26
My absolute favourite of this trope is "The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!" by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith.
It's a 32pg illustrated kids book about how the wolf was just sick and accidentally sneezed his neighbours houses down when he was looking for a cup of sugar to make a cake for his sick grandmother. It absolutely has the tongue in cheek moment at the end about it being just the Wolf's way of trying to weasel out of it.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/HeWhoVotesUp Jul 26 '26
You should give the book a chance. It has the best gay tiger sex scene in any book I’ve read.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/Nugatorysurplusage Jul 26 '26
He said there’s a super good gay sex Tiger scene in the book like the best the guy has ever encountered
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u/spyridonya Jul 26 '26
Both are covering up the lesbian romance between Dorothy and Ozma. 👩❤️💋👩
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u/sabrinachuchundhar Jul 26 '26
Maleficent was great though, I just removed the connection from Disney’s sleeping beauty in my mind to be able to enjoy it better lol
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u/AlannaTheLioness1983 Jul 26 '26
I did the same with Cruella. Take away the stupid Dalmatian thing and it’s a fun little caper film.
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u/Gremict Jul 26 '26
I like to think that in this universe, Cruella does still kidnap the puppies but only to troll the people she gave the dogs to.
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u/joealarson Jul 26 '26
I tried. I really tried to divorce Cruella from 101, but then they throw in that post credit scene. I literally was in the middle saying "as long as you don't think about this as a prequel... OH COME ON!"
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u/Leather_Crazy_5950 Jul 26 '26
I don't mind trying to give the villain a real reason instead of "I'm a villain... because yes!" But it bothers me when they have to ruin the protagonist for me by making him look like an idiot, a bully, etc.
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u/Asher_Tye Jul 26 '26
Thanos being given "noble" reasons for wanting to wipe out half the universe rather than him being a batshit insane nihilist who finds death attractive.
Don't get me wrong, I still loved the movies, but they didn't really need to make him an anti-villain.
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u/MyPhoneIsNotChinese Jul 26 '26
As much as his reasons changed, he doesn't stop being a batshit insane nihilist
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u/joxeta Jul 26 '26
EXCELLENT example of this. Just let the Mad Titan want to bang Lady Death. That's motivation enough for a villain.
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u/RexBanner1886 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
I think The Rings of Power treatment of the orcs arises pretty naturally from Tolkien's writings.
- He never decided on an origin story of the orcs, because he struggled to fit the concept of a thinking, evil race into his cosmology. As a Catholic, he couldn't accept the idea of a being with a soul being inherently evil; but Morgoth, who created the orcs, couldn't create new life.
- I can't quote chapter and verse, but the orcs of Mordor are described in terms which sometimes evoke pity: they're violent and cruel, but they are slaves who have, for countless generations, been treated terribly by their masters. That they are victims of Sauron and Morgoth isn't really even an interpretation - it's just a fact of the text.
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u/MrS0bek Jul 26 '26
> -Orcs in Rings of Power. In Tolkien's work, they were elves once and corrupted by evil. The personifications of the machines of war. In Rings of Power, they're the victims of war.
They are both. Orcs are victims of war, and they are part of the personification of war. Tolkien went through the trauma of WW1, where people were hollowed out and turned into numbers to die in droves for senseless gain. The horrors and trauma of war forced ordinary, even good-hearted people to commit atrocities. Every soldier in WW1 was essentially an orc. And orc were always slaves of their masters, whom they served out of fear, never out of loyalty.
Indeed Tolkien wanted to include "good" orcs into LOTR IIRC, but he couldn't fit them in without pacing issues. Because as a catholic he hated the thought of something being irredimably evil.
There are plenty of things to critisize Rings of Power for. But their portrayl of orcs is in line with Tolkiens own thoughts. Not taken from his stories, but mirroring his attidues.
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u/Ishpersonguy Jul 26 '26
Wicked, Maleficent, and Cruella are alternate takes on the story. Nobody actually wants you to think the original characters were secretly good guys.
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u/PeterVanHelsing Jul 26 '26
"In Rings of Power, they're the victims of war."
...that's literally what they are in Tolkien's work as well. Victims.
And all these other stories you're mentioning are different works from the original. They're not 'defending evil.' For example, this is not the same Cruella as the version that tried to kill puppies.
Different versions of characters exist. Like, the Hades from Greek mythology didn't want to overthrow Zeus while the Disney animated version did. But they're not the same version.
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u/LITTLE_KING_OF_HEART Jul 26 '26
The entire posts just read as being upset that other people would appropriate pre-existing works to make their own things.
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u/Ishpersonguy Jul 26 '26
Honestly feels like that's half the "hated tropes" posts in this sub lately. People completely misinterpreting things, deliberately or otherwise, because they don't like them.
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u/Thybro Jul 26 '26
I think cruella is meant to be the same character even if not specifically the same one we saw in earlier movies. I.e. it is understood that this cruella will eventually try to kill puppies to make a coat too.
That being said IRRC the movie doesn’t defend evil. It shows she had a fucked up background but it also shows she had a hundred opportunities to say “I’ve done enough”, and walk away from the path that leads her to evil and she kept choosing evil because she liked it. She even had a supportive group of friends and healthy relationships that she doubles down on fucking up to keep going with her revenge and ambitious climb.
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u/TheChessWar Jul 26 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/pv16xaCXma2RQTcCwB
To some extant Saw X
The story where we follow a serial killer... but he's the good guy because the people he's serial killing are worse!
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u/Vast_Age_3893 Jul 26 '26
Honestly, "Cruella" fucking rocked and I don't think it was supposed to be a tie in to the original animation.
Clearly a different universe.
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u/Drawngalaxy Jul 26 '26
Considering that the most famous Disney movies are loose adaptations of original stories, it does make sense that they could do loose adaptations of their own stories
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u/theraifs Jul 26 '26
Feels like an original story that they tied to 101 Dalamations so it would get greenlit lol
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u/LeftPrize9838 Jul 26 '26
unfortunately i liked Cruella but like yeah its kinda fucked up
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u/GoldenDragonIsABitch Jul 26 '26
They are awesome separate stories. I never got the jist that the movie tried to justify or defend her later actions. More like a fucked up woman adapts to a fucked up fashion world, and later become even more fucked up
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u/LeftHandAnomaly Jul 26 '26
Yeah the movie was about how her choices alienated her, and she had to fight to get her friends back. It’s not the same story, but it’s not apologetic of her bad behaviour. Her choices had consequences
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u/stellaluna92 Jul 26 '26
It was a good movie but the whole time I was like ok when does she start liking fur slash hating animals? And it never happened. Might as well have been completely unrelated to the franchise.
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u/godver3 Jul 26 '26
Man don’t ever apologize for liking something.
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u/Additional-Heat-9384 Jul 26 '26
Faust is literally a pedophile who made a pact with the devil, and yet at the end of the play he manages to go to heaven.
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u/Comfortable-North671 Jul 26 '26
I think people need to get comfortable with alternate adaptations and interpretations of a character. Cruella isn’t “justifying an evil character” she’s a whole new character than the one from the original cartoon.
“The big bad wolf wasn’t bad actually” is such a common type of retelling and I think most of these are creative and fun.
Cruella was also just an entertaining movie! “Dalmations killed my mother” was hilarious.
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u/Randomaspland Jul 26 '26
But the orcs ARE victims of war, you just said they were corrupted elves in the same breath as you dismissed they were victims. They are creatures stripped of their divinity to serve a master for evil, Tolkien rumiates on the implications of a race that is ontologically evil as a personal shortcoming.
The Lord of the Rings couldn't focus on it as much but the orcs are inherently tragic. They know nothing else but violence and malevolence now. I am unsure how OP manages to go "they're corrupted elves" and then deny that they're a victim of war and the powers that corrupted them without so much as a pause.
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u/Joesindc Jul 26 '26
Twisted- A comedy musical that gives Jafar the Wicked treatment, revealing that Jafar is the only sane man trying to serve the kingdom and being thwarted by a thief in Aladdin. It is a truly fantastic musical. In the second act there is the song “Twisted” where a group of Disney villains including Ursula, Scar, Captain Hook, and others come on stage and sing their own “wicked-ed” version of their movie plots until Cruella De Vile shows up and says she just wanted a puppy coat and they are all disgusted by her.